With only two years of the 20th century to run, probably we are justified in attempting to take some sort of bird's-eye, retrospective view of its literature. But is such a project possible any more? The old concept of "world literature" meant little more than the masterpieces of the West back to Greco-Roman times, plus a few unavoidable classics dutifully thrown in from Oriental literatures - the Bhagavad-Gita, Shakuntala, Confucius, perhaps Li-Po, a few Persian and Indian poets. The Everyman Library and its kind were largely conceived on this basis. In those days, a man was considered a genuine literary cosmopolitan if he spoke and read three, or perhaps four, European languages reasonably fluently.
Today, such cultural constructs have broken down as the barriers of space and time and linguistics are increasingly eroded. The literatures of other lands and continents have been deluged upon us, though mainly through translation - much of it probably inadequate, but available nonetheless. In almost any good paperback store you can pick up anthologies of modern African poetry, Latin-American novels, Australian fiction, a whole shelf-full of writers from Eastern Europe, short stories from China or Japan, Indian philosophy, Russian memoirs . . . and, of course, American writers in mass phalanxes, particularly in the fiction and poetry sections where they often outnumber other English-speaking authors. A Eurocentric view simply is no longer possible.
In the last 3O years, the Nobel Prize has ceased to be virtually a European monopoly, and this trend seems likely to be accentuated rather than to contract. The Nobel, in any case, has never been a reliable guide or even pointer to literary greatness; it began disastrously by crowning an almost forgotten French poet, Sully Prudhomme. The list of those who never won it is considerable - Joyce, Proust, Lorca, Machado, Hardy, Musil, Dreiser, Henry James, Julien Green, Ezra Pound, Wallace Stevens, Brecht, Akhmatova, Tsvetayeva, Virginia Woolf, Edith Wharton. And by contrast, how many Nobel winners are scarcely heard of now: Pearl Buck, Benavente, Spitteler, Mauriac, etc? Galsworthy has survived mainly through television adaptations of his basically dull novels. Selma Lagerlof is still in print but is no household name any longer, although she won the prize for Sweden against the counter-claims of Strindberg, one of the century's greatest dramatists. Our own George Bernard Shaw is greatly shrunken in literary prestige while Barrie, once his chief rival in Britain, has receded almost into invisibility. Two of France's most acclaimed novelists and men of letters, Andre Gide and Anatole France, are less and less read - in fact, France is scarcely read at all any more, and the average reader would be hard pushed to name a single book by him. And a generation ago, would any respected critic have thought seriously about the survival prospects of Zane Grey, Raymond Chandler, John Buchan and Jack London, not to mention Rider Haggard, Conan Doyle and M.R. James? Yet today, these are all still read and enjoyed by millions of people who are not necessarily unintelligent or lacking in taste, but who do at least know what bores them and what doesn't. It does not do to be too narrowly or rigidly purist; good writing has many categories and sub-sections, and it is not always the patricians and mandarins of literature who survive best.
Hidden delights of German literature
I own several literary encyclopaedias, all of them a decade or even two decades out of date. They serve me mainly for dates and references, but in any case, I like leafing through them as an end in itself. This gives me, or rather used to give me, a certain exciting sense of vast possibilities, of great luminous regions of Weltlitteratur waiting to be explored. The ultimate effect on me nowadays, however, is chiefly one of dismay. All those authors, in so many languages - and I haven't read a tenth of them! And in the case of many of the others, I may have read one book, or perhaps even three or four works, but most of these authors seem to have been so dauntingly productive. Take Thomas Mann, for instance. Over the years I have read most of the usual ones: The Magic Mountain, Felix Krull (my favourite Mann novel), Dr Fau- stus and the volume of stories collected under the title Tonio Kroger. I couldn't finish Buddenbrooks and never got past a few pages of Joseph and His Brethren; lesser novels such as Royal Highness and Lotte at Wei- mar I sampled and grew bored with - or perhaps I merely turned to something else. But Mann wrote so much more than that, and how many people read these books today, or have even heard of them?
As for his elder brother Heinrich, he has become virtually a museum piece, apart from the fact that Professor Unrat supplied the story for The Blue Angel and so helped to project Marlene Dietrich into world fame. Penguin Modern Classics, a splendid series, has brought us other German novelists of the first half-century who had been obscured by Mann's shrewdly fostered fame and "liberal" legend. One is Alexander Doblin, whose Berlin Alexanderplatz has even been turned into a successful TV series. This is the true Brechtian underworld, only less stagey and without the usual tedious Leftist preaching. Another recorder of the same period, Hans Fallada (Rudolf Ditzen in private life) has drifted back into consciousness with reissues of his masterpiece Little Man, What Now? Fallada wrote at least half-a-dozen other novels, but again, who knows them, besides academics?
The death of Ernst Junger early this year passed almost unnoticed in the English press, and the only reference I have seen to it in this country was in a column on the leader page of this newspaper. Yet purely on a biographical level alone, Junger is/was an extraordinary figure, a man who as a youthful storm-trooper in the first World War, suffered double wounds seven times, and lived to record his trench experiences in Storm of Steel. He wrote much better books than that in maturity, although for Germans it still rivals Remarque's All Quiet on the Western Front in popularity as a war classic. Many intelligent Germans I have met regard him as their greatest writer of the past 60 years, and probably their finest prose stylist since Nietzsche, as well as a powerful and solitary thinker. However, his outlook was Radical Right, which presumably puts him out of court for the well-drilled legions of the Politically Correct.
Austrian literature was generally believed, until recently, to have come to a stop with the generation of Musil and Hofmannsthal and Karl Krauss. There are several English translations available of Musil's huge novel The Man Without Qualities, and Young Torless and some of his shorter fiction is also in paperback. Hofmannsthal, by contrast, seems to be rather out of fashion and much of his prose - he is a magnificent essayist and critic in particular - is unobtainable outside German-speaking lands; and the splendid poetry can only be enjoyed in the original (although there are at least three versions in English of Die Beiden.) Krauss, the great aphorist and satirist and chief analyst of Old Vienna and of Habsburg decline, is probably more read about than read in this part of the world. The immediately succeeding generation of Austrian writers has only gained currency in Western European countries over the last two decades. Heimito von Doderer's intricate, slow-moving, rather Proustian novel of Vienna between the two world wars, The Demons, is available in at least one paperback format, and so is some of his shorter fiction. Perhaps one day we shall also get his diaries and commentaries?
He is a formidable intellectual and commentator as well as a major novelist - a classic example of that very subtle and special organism, the Austrian mind. Odon von Horvath, probably the best Austrian playwright of between the wars, has come back into fashion since the 1960s and Tales from the Vienna Woods has been performed in Britain. Horvath wrote a lot in his short life (1901-38) and apart from his plays there are three novels, which nobody seems to have read. Joseph Roth's fine Radetzky March can be bought in Penguin, and other novels of his are available in English. Curiously enough, both of these gifted men, who were personal friends, died in exile in Paris within a year of each other - Horvath was crushed by a falling bough in the Bois de Boulogne, where he had taken shelter under a tree from a thunderstorm. Roth seems, quite simply and brutally, to have drunk himself to death in the following year, 1939. Elias Canetti, a Nobel Prize winner, was actually born in Bulgaria, but Central Europe was his natural habitat and his finest or at least his best-known work, the Kafkaesque novel translated into English as Auto da Fe, is actually set in Vienna. (People in that city still talk almost compulsively about him and his powerful personality, as I can testify myself).
Modern poetry in German has been overshadowed by Paul Celan, a very tough nut to crack or even pierce, both in the original and in translation. (Previously he had been overshadowed by Rilke, who has always ranked high in the West and was translated into English and French from quite early in his career). Michael Hamburger's versions are probably the best; indeed Hamburger is the best all-round translator of German poetry into English (he is himself bilingual). There have, however, been fine versions of Celan produced in this country by Brian Lynch and Peter Jankowsky, working in collaboration. The Austrian Ingeborg Bachmann is probably more accessible, though my own favourite among modern German poets is Johannes Bobrowski, whose magical, slightly eerie evocations of the great "Sarmatian plain" of East Prussia and the region stretching to the Niemen are like nothing else I know of in modern literature.
France's cultural secrets
French literature is always a minefield to an outsider, since the French writers who travel well abroad are rarely the ones who are well considered at home. Of all the great European traditions, it is probably the most inbred and the most subtilised, a cultural frontier that can barely be crossed without naturalisation papers - which are hard to get. How many people read, or have read, Proust in the original? (I haven't, for one, and I do not intend to try, either). At any rate, most readers have at least tried him in English. (His essays and literary criticism, by the way, are delightful reading).
Colette is said to sound rather fulsome and adipose in translation, though I have never noticed it myself, and in any case it seems to suit her full-corseted, Belle Epoque personality. The southern novels of Jean Giono are still popular in France - at least, they are usually prominent in Paris bookshops. Raymond Radiguet's The Devil in the Flesh (Le Diable au Corps) has been a cult book for decades, and deservedly so, though it has been helped by his very early death and personal legend. Personal legend has no doubt also helped the posthumous reputation of Antoine Saint-Exupery ("Saint-Ex"). but he really doesn't need this biographical cultism, since his books are brilliant in their own right - possibly the only genuine literature which has come out of flying and aeroplanes. There are plenty of readable English translations - though why should Terre des hommes be anglicised as Wind, Sand and Stars? - and two good modern biographies, though they disagree in detail about his still-mysterious death over the Mediterranean in 1944.
By contrast, the literary standing of Louis-Ferdinand Celine seems to be still under shadow because of his playing ball with Fascism and his rabid anti-Semitism. He is, however, an extraordinary and utterly original writer, though his style is notoriously difficult - not abstruse or intellectualised, but full of slang and obscenities and ultra-personal idioms. Obviously, a translator's nightmare, but I have known cultured Frenchmen who swear by him as a genius born. Sartre and de Beauvoir you can have, without reservations, and personally I would be quite content at this stage to see their combined writings put in a sack and dumped in the Seine, as the great scholar Buridan was reputedly treated by the vicious Margaret of Burgundy. Both have contributed far too much to the already overbearing weight of human boredom, and the biographical cult surrounding them since their deaths has been equally tedious and unbalanced. Camus is admittedly better, but probably too much has been made of him too, while in purely philosophic terms the quasi-Existentialist writings of Gabriel Marcel ought to be better known. The great Julien Green is recently dead, within sight of his century of years, and with an astonishing list of books behind him, some of them written in English as he was bilingual from childhood. Over the past decade, the various volumes of his ruminative, slow-moving autobiography have been published by Marion Boyars, though his marvellous Journals (so much more spiritually authentic than Gide's) are out of print.
Green's strange, oppressive, almost Gothic novels are rather an acquired taste, but they include a number of masterpieces, while his play Sud is said by those who have seen it to be an exceptional piece of theatre. The so-called "anti-novels" of Butor and Robbe-Grillet, which were so much talked about a generation ago, are scarcely readable today - but then, were they ever that? Natalie Sarraute, who used to be grouped with them, is much more interesting, though her art moves in a narrow orbit. (The Planetarium I remember as an unusual and distinguished book). French poets? There are simply so many of them, and I don't really trust my judgment and knowledge in this area.
Louis Aragon's poignant second World War poems are still worth reading, though his novels have fallen out of the running. Rene Char seems to me a poet of European size, who took Surrealism in his stride and moved on to a cosmic sense of nature and human destiny. He has always attracted painters, including Braque and Picasso who were his associates, and his own word-painting of the Provencal landscape reaches heights of imagistic power. Paul Eluard, his close friend, always commanded an English readership (Char does not have one, really) and is adept at the kind of refined eroticism which only the French and the Italians have mastered. Another "difficult" poet is Pierre Reverdy, whose work always reminds me of the paintings of Juan Gris in its subtlety and angularity and play of light and shadow. Unless your French is fluent enough to grasp nuances of tone, he is not easy reading, but he is an important figure and a seminal one. Leaping ahead to the present, Philippe Jacottet has been ably translated by Derek Mahon, while Yves Bonnefoy is a distinguished poet who has visited Ireland.
Pirandello to Pavese
I once read a book on 20th-century theatre by Eric Bentley, in which one paragraph began pontifically: "When we re-read the 44 plays of Pirandello . . . " Most of us are unlikely to have read them even once. Yet Pirandello is an indispensable dramatist, one of the genuine innovators and, for my own taste at least, far more dramatic than Brecht though just as stimulating intellectually. Among recent Italian poets, Saba, Ungaretti and Montale are all notable figures; while among the prose writers, Italo Calvino and Primo Levi won international reputations. Calvino is probably at his best in some of his early, neo-realist stories and in the black humour of "The Baron in the Trees", which forms part of the book called Our Forefathers. Levi (who committed suicide in 1987) wrote classic accounts of his prison-camp experiences, as well as novels, autobiographical sketches, essays and poetry. All in all, he was a formidable all-round man of letters and a distinguished intellectual.
During the 1960s there was a big posthumous cult of the novels of Cesare Pavese, which had the same kind of chic, shrug-between-the-lines disillusion as the fashionable Italian cinema of the time; but it has faded, as it was bound to do. As for Alberto Moravia, so vocal and omnipresent in the immediate postwar years, he seems very dated today.
The Iberian colonies' revenge
Lorca appears to be the only Spanish writer of whom everyone has heard, although Antonio Machado and Juan Ramon Jimenez, his elders, are both more substantial poets. Still, it would be hard or perverse to compile an anthology of the best twentieth-century European verse and leave him out - particularly the "Llanto por Ignacio Sanchez Mejias", a poem which probably needs to be read aloud for full effect. Lorca was no intellectual heavyweight, but he had a hypersensitive ear - he was an accomplished amateur musician - and an excellent verse technique, something which is often overlooked. Miguel Hernandez, whom he encouraged and whose health was broken in a Francoist prison, would almost certainly have been a major poet if he had lived just a little longer, instead of dying in his early thirties.
It has been a rich century for Spanish verse, but none of the novelists - Pio Baroja, Perez de Ayala, etc - seems of equivalent calibre, though there has been much splendid philosophic, historico-social, and polemical prose from thinkers such as Ortega y Gasset, Unamuno and Salvador de Madariaga. In the theatre, only Lorca's plays are well known abroad, although Benavente (as already mentioned) won a Nobel Prize in his time. In Portugal, the poetry of Fernando Pessoa (written under a number of pseudonyms as well as, intermittently, under his own name) has so magnetised recent attention that there is no obvious room for anyone else. However, in the past two decades Latin-American writing has overshadowed the literature of the home countries, especially the school of novelists of whom the best known is Gabriel Garcia Marquez. A generation ago, it was the poets who dominated internationally rather than the novelists - Pablo Neruda and Gabriela Mistral (yet another Nobel winner) in Chile, Octavio Paz and Alfonso Reyes in Mexico, Nicolas Guillen in Cuba, Carrera Andrade in Ecuador, Cecilia Meireles in Brazil. Rather strangely, 20th-century Latin-American writing took its cue from Paris rather than from Madrid or Barcelona or Lisbon, and from French Surrealism in particular.
The Russian tradition
Russian literature has never lacked a readership in the West, from the generation of Tolstoy and Turgenev down to the writers of the Thaw and their immediate successors. The great poets, Akhmatova, Mandelstam, Pasternak, Tsvetayeva, Khodasevich, Mayakovsky, all had close links with the West and have been much translated. There has been a Nicolai Bulgakov cult in recent years, largely based on his unfinished novel The Master and Marguerite, which is in effect a modern Faust-and-Gretchen tale or allegory, with the sinister Woland as an equivalent to Mephistopheles, but his other works are not on the same literary level, with the possible exception of Black Snow, a brilliant and savagely funny satire on Stanislavsky and his Moscow Arts Theatre.
Prose contemporaries of Bulgakov, such as Zamyatin and Pilnyak, do not seem to travel well, though Nabokov - the quintessence of the upper-crust emigre Russian writer - won a world reputation in his lifetime and a succes de scandale with Lolita.
There was a time when Sholokhov's huge Quiet Don novel seemed the prose epic of the revolutionary generation, but when I tried to read it again recently, it sounded heavily obvious and Hollywood-ish, even crude. Probably Pasternak's over-praised Dr Zhivago, which landed him in the middle of an ugly political row, did Russian postwar literature another disservice by distracting public attention - in the West anyway - from gifted writers of the younger generation.
In particular, the so-called "quiet school" which first emerged in the 1950s has been largely overlooked abroad, at a time when noisy, exhibitionist writers such as Yevtushenko - one of the earliest of the modern performance poets - were making headlines. In the words of a recent commentator, this "quiet school" consisted mainly "of writers and poets who turned from socialist realism to nature, the lone human individual, and art". By far the best of them was Yury Kazakov, who died in 1983 in his mid-fifties, and who set many of his short stories (he wrote no novel) in the rural and wooded North Russian regions. He wrote relatively little, but his stories have an authentic, haunting lyricism without being at all soft-cored, and he is in a great line which stretches back through Chekhov and Ivan Bunin to Turgenev.
The Slavs: a closed book
The literature of the other Slav countries, of the Poles, Czechs, Serbs etc. is a closed book to most of us, though Poland's great poet, Czeslaw Milosz, is one case of a Nobel Prize winner (our own Seamus Heaney is another) who has genuinely deserved the honour. In particular, his long poem entitled "The World", which is subtitled "A Naive Poem", is one of the great, unique things in modern literature - its genesis was the dark years of German occupation, when the Slavonic nations literally faced extinction. This masterwork, by the way, has been beautifully rendered into English by Robert Haas and Robert Pinsky.
The Czech dramatist Vaclav Havel has been probably more talked about than read or seen on the stage. Recent events in the Balkans have renewed interest in the novels of the Yugoslav writer Ivo Andric, whose best known work, The Bridge on the Drina, is available in at least one British paperback imprint; another novelist of note is the Romanian Mircea Eliade, though he was as much a religious thinker as a fiction-writer.
As for modern Hungary, its cultural strangeness and the remoteness of its language have deprived it of good translators, and which of us is going to learn Hungarian? We hear regularly of the greatness of such writers as Andre Ady, but who will bring him alive for us? Traditionally the East European nations have faced west culturally, and for decades Paris was their real capital, particularly after the eclipse of Vienna. Today, most of them appear to be even more scattered and Milosz, for instance, was for years based in America. (The same was true of the Russian poet Josef Brodsky, who also won the Nobel Prize but died recently in his fifties. )
England's literary colonies
It is hardly necessary to discuss modern English and Irish literature here, since we live with the latter and appear to be bound unbreakably to the former. This last factor is mainly because of our small population and the tendency of Irish writers, once they have made some reputation at home, to gravitate towards London publishing houses. Yeats and Louis MacNeice, for instance, share dual literary nationality and belong both to English and Irish literature; and since Beckett won a Nobel Prize (that again!) there has been a notable tendency for British critics to claim him for themselves. The same has been true of Seamus Heaney, who, in any case, has politely but firmly resisted official anglicisation.
Interestingly, this has never been the case with Joyce, who has never entered the bloodstream of English writing; those English writers who show his influence strongly, such as the remarkable John Cowper Powys and David Jones, tend to be outsiders; both are Anglo-Welsh. In the past two decades there has been a flood, or tidal wave, of what might be called post-colonial writing - from Africa, Australia, India, etc. relying heavily on local colour and all too obviously geared, as a rule, to literary prizes such as the Booker. A little time is needed to sort this out; at the moment, most of it appears to be opportunistic and self-conscious, with an eye to fashionable publicity and the international market. Japan and China are another matter, and Japanese fiction in particular has entered the consciousness of the West - particularly the novels of Junichiro Tanizaki, whose books The Makioka Sisters, Diary of a Mad Old Man and The Key all seem to me artistic masterpieces.
One special, even unique aspect of our century is the enormous competition it has faced almost throughout from the growth of the visual arts - including, under that label, cinema, photography, TV and videos as well as the traditional media of painting, sculpture and graphics. This is unprecedented in history, and somebody has called our era, with a good deal of justice, the Age of the Moving Image. In spite of the vast number of books printed and sold, this visual culture now threatens to replace the modern mass literacy which dates largely from the 19th century. Literacy (in any real sense, not the ability to read the address on a letter envelope) is also under increasing threat from the omnipresent cultural levelling - downward levelling - of recent decades; and without wishing to sound facetious, I find the monosyllabic illiteracy of the Pop Culture and the polysyllabic semi-literacy of the New University Jargon almost equally objectionable. The immediate outlook is not bright, then, but perhaps it is the dark before some new, unsuspected dawn?
Brian Fallon is the author of An Age of Innocence, published by Gill & Macmillan
